


pneuma

by brieflygorgeous



Category: Stray Kids (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Urban Fantasy, Animal Death, Drama, Hospitals, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Magical Realism, Minor Character Death, Tarot References, Witches, it's no one from skz tho, rated M for one scene only
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-03
Updated: 2019-08-03
Packaged: 2020-07-30 15:28:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,163
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20099455
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brieflygorgeous/pseuds/brieflygorgeous
Summary: pneuma. noun. a divine breath of life."Minho is a bloodshot eyed smile and speed talking caffeined disaster, but he is kind and doesn’t laugh (too much) when Changbin tells him he got a severe burning on the back of his hand by late night tea brewing."





	pneuma

**Author's Note:**

> no beta, we die with our typos.
> 
> trigger warnings: minor character death (no one from skz), animal death, one non explicit sex scene, smoking

Minho is a bloodshot eyed smile and speed talking caffeined disaster, but he is kind and doesn’t laugh (too much) when Changbin tells him he got a severe burning on the back of his hand by late night tea brewing.

The Emergency Room smells like a vacuum, an aseptic hollowness that tunes Changbin’s senses to the strange frequency coming from Minho.

Changbin is a mix of empathy and clairvoyance, which means his power manifests in the most inconvenient of ways. People pass him by like electric imbalance, fuzzy static itching on his tongue with the urge to discharge a message, whatever it is his mind picks up from a single surface of contact.

“You’re doing your best,” he blurts on Minho’s face while he is patching Changbin’s hand with layers of a funny smelling ointment and thin bandages, talking mindlessly about his three cats whose names are quickly escaping Changbin’s attention with his need to say something. “This loneliness is temporary.”

The words seem to hit Minho with an unwelcome familiarity in the stunned silence of his hands and mouth. Changbin’s skin is raw and prickly where Minho holds him, throbbing with a heat so intense the smell of herbal tea and other dried out things rob him off all coherence.

“I’m not lonely,” Minho says at last, with the pearly white of his front teeth attempting to neutralize whatever it is Changbin sees —_ feels _— in him. “I have my cats.”

Changbin wants to say it’s the cats. The cats are making him lonely. But he doesn’t know how to cut the last, tight thread that still seems to be pulling Minho’s lips up in a smile. So he doesn’t.

x

Changbin buys a bag of rattling baby bird bones from Chan’s supply store in a hidden alley downtown and takes it with him wherever he goes. It’s a side effect of his power, these impulsive acts he can’t possibly explain with logical reasoning, can only acknowledge deep down in his marrow that one day they will make sense.

Minho is a cloud of smoke propped against the hospital back door, apples of his cheeks stained red from the cold and other bone rattling feelings.

“Aren’t you a doctor? Should you be smoking?”

“Life is temporary. Let me burn it while I can.”

Minho uses the heel of his worn out shoe to put out his cigarette. His scrubs are pristine white like his teeth.

“What is that bag?”

“Baby bird bones.”

“You wanna see something cool?”

Minho cups the brittle bones like a prayer, and the deep breath he takes sounds like the earth opening up. Life is blown from his lips to the shuddering bird that takes flight from his hands.

“You’re a necromancer?”

“I’m a doctor,” Minho says, and it weights on Changbin the irony of his magic, a slow healing that never completes the illusion of life.

Changbin sees the flaps of that bird’s wings in the folds under Minho’s eyes, creasing, folding, closing. Dead.

Minho blinks and Changbin feels the rattling of baby bird bones inside the bag.

x

New skin grows on the back of Changbin’s hand as if the sun has exploded within the frame of his fingers, sensitive and ready to break again if not treated with care. Minho’s hands are gentle like the rest of him, so impossibly gentle Changbin nearly expects him to take his hand and kiss it alive like a bird. The thought sends sparks through Changbin, mini explosions of herbal tea all over again.

“Thanks.”

“No problem. Just use some more ointment and it should be good in a few more days.”

Changbin knows for a fact being an empath entails some uncomfortable situations, like sitting before your doctor and wondering who takes care of him while he is taking care of others. Minho has three framed photos of his cats on the table and maybe this is how he’s found to keep a little sanity in this job.

“So.”

“So?”

“Are you free today?”

“I have a feeling you know I am.”

Changbin has the decency to blush when Minho passes him a prescription with his number, a sequence Changbin feels he already knew anyway.

x

Clairvoyance comes in echoes. Echoes in his brain when he’s chopping vegetables in his kitchen at 5 pm and the urge to call Jisung for dinner strikes the exact moment Jisung was about to pay for a week worth of frozen meals from the convenience store; echoes in his soul when he’s shuffling his tarot deck and once the fool card jumps out on its own, he tells Hyunjin to buy a cat’s bed even though he doesn’t have a cat. Still doesn’t, but will.

Echoes over his skin, too. Like ripples of light escaping through the translucent curtains of a balcony from where Minho emerges, shirtless, holding Changbin’s favorite mug, the one that’s chipped on the rim, making a perfect v where it has cut on Minho’s lips. He should have told Minho, but the temporary scar on his upper lip echoes something in Changbin, something hot and blinding like the kiss Minho leaves on the back of his hand, the burned one.

“You manipulated me into your bed,” Minho giggles and it too echoes in Changbin’s heart, like the soft purring of three cats trying to make themselves a home for Minho.

x

Sleep isn’t so much of an action as it is interruption. Like standing at the intersection of nameless roads, the soft murmur of wind carrying a thousand captivating voices that want to be heard, all clashing into Changbin at once. Sometimes it takes him several minutes to figure out whether he is asleep, awake or neither.

By the nightstand there’s always a thermal bottle of Seungmin’s personal tea blend and Changbin’s old grimoire which he uses to collect the disjointed fragments of his dreams. The words usually don’t form an idea right away, but he understands something with just the name breezing out his lips.

_ Minho hyung _

A queen of pentacles and a six of cups lie by the foot of his bed, soaking in the moonlight that slices through the window of his bedroom. It’s been closed shut and stuck for the past three years since that one time the moon coaxed him out on a trance, and Changbin plummeted from the second floor. The scar on his left ankle has the scythe shape of a waning moon.

Not even the hint of a whistle comes through the imaginary cracks on the floorboards though. Life sometimes comes unannounced. Changbin shields the cards from the moonlight.

A mother and child share a cup in the six of cups. Past and future, reminiscing. The queen of pentacles holds a coin close to her belly, waiting. Expecting. The news would overjoy him had they not been delivered at night, with only the cold breath of Minho’s voice through the phone as its witness.

_ “Is that all I get? They asked me. How could I tell them that was it?” _

A stillborn. Moved into the world without a breath in his lung. Flew just as quick out of sight. Minho had seen it all with the warm blood of the mother still on his hands. The nurturing mother without a baby to nurture. The baby, now a past tense. Minho’s (lack of) power, a burden.

“Life is a wheel, hyung,” Changbin says, though he knows Minho feels stuck in reverse. “Let it spin.”

But he can’t. He’s a necromancer. He defies the laws of life.

Changbin has seen it in a dream, once. Minho under the shade of the dead plum tree in his backyard with soil up to his elbows, his hands digging deeper and deeper into the earth, the labored breath of pursuing a fragile thread back to life. That was the first time Changbin saw a tree on full bloom in winter. 

The dirt covered all the way to Minho’s pearly white teeth, a smile that almost, almost resembled happiness. With his hands cold from midwinter frost, Changbin feared Minho was giving his life away to the things he loved.

x

The cats.

Three tabby cats that come running the moment Minho opens the front door and greets them one by one, Soonie, Doongie and baby Dori. Three loving cats that rub their heads and bodies and tails between Minho’s ankles and choose Changbin next, sniffing him, circling him, licking between his toes. It’s not their sandpaper tongues that send a shiver straight to his heart. It’s their eyes.

Three pairs of eyes.

Three pairs of dead cat eyes.

Minho picks one, the smallest, who will forever remain small in the cradle of his arms. Dori purrs and it sounds like a horn, like the screeching of tires and a crash, violent and numbing. 

The other two died in each other’s embrace, two halves of the same clock, leaving life the same way they arrived.

Twin cats who had grown with Minho, the siblings he never had.

What did Dori ever had?

“Bones,” Minho says. “His bones were so small they turned into dust. Bringing him back was the hardest one I’ve ever had.”

Minho’s is a forbidden kind of magic. Many consider it a straight up curse. 

x

Witches and commoners alike seek Changbin at the tea room in the back of Chan’s shop. Before any transaction, he makes it clear he can’t provide solutions. At best he gives people hints.

Sometimes he gives them one of the many trinkets he’s been paid with through the years — a compass whose needle only points south; a jar containing seeds from every apple of an ancient tree; a letter, still sealed, unknown words delivered by an overseas visitor.

Sometimes no one comes looking for answers, but the place has absorbed enough of Changbin’s presence to know when it is needed. 

Minho is there, and so is a black cat whose starved golden eyes prey the milk carton Changbin, lactose intolerant as he is, has bought for his evening snack.

“Ah, just what we needed,” Minho digs a plate from the cupboard, and the flower pattern painted on it has Hyunjin’s signature at the bottom. “Found this bad boy looking for food in the trash can outside.”

The cat kneads the soft leather of Minho’s shoes, an act that triggers recognition and fondness. But Changbin doesn’t let the kitty make a home in Minho’s heart. This isn’t where it belongs, both he and Minho know.

Changbin calls Hyunjin instead and asks if he has the cat bed ready.

“Give him a name,” Minho says when he places the kitty in Hyunjin’s arms. “They stray less if they know they’re yours.”

Something echoes in Changbin, and it sounds like footsteps through hospital hallways late at night, alone. Light steps that try to mimic a cat’s, waiting at home for his owner to call his name. When Minho returned at dawn, it was already too late. Dori forgot he was ever there.

Changbin slides off the ring on his index finger and gives it to Minho.

“What is this for?”

“So you don’t forget I’m yours.”

Minho doesn’t say anything. He spends a long time staring at the ring. He doesn’t give it back to Changbin.

x

Changbin usually isn’t waiting for a sign when it eventually comes. Some things just want to be known, like nightmares. Sooner or later, you have to let them in.

A black butterfly rests on the glass panel of the bedroom window, its wings cutting a shadow in the bright sun rays. Changbin doesn’t find it weird that the stuck latch yields to let the butterfly in. She waltz in patterns he can’t read until she decides she’s had enough. Changbin mouths a thank you before she lets herself out the window.

A gust of wind turns Changbin into the eye of a storm of tarot cards. He catches two midair. On his left hand, the Strength. On his right hand, where the ring is missing from his index finger, the Death. The rest of the deck rains down on the floor, face down. Changbin locks the window once more.

He sees the butterfly again crawling up the shelves of Woojin’s book store in the forbidden magic section; sees her chased down by the black cat now guarding Hyunjin’s flower shop; sees her glued to a KFC sign advertising a bucket of chicken pieces for two.

Changbin sees her one last time when he brings Minho dinner in the children’s wing at the hospital, where Minho sits in a low plastic table covered with crayon drawings. The butterfly circles Minho’s head like a dark halo as he speaks soft and slow with the ghostly shape of a child.

“You did well. Let’s meet again in your next life.”

Minho ruffles the air where the child’s hair disappears in the moonlight. The butterfly is gone.

Minho turns around, as if he was expecting to find Changbin right there, waiting for him.

“Changbinnie! How did you know I wanted to eat fried chicken tonight?”

“A black butterfly told me.”

x

Minho makes love to him like he’s pulling the strings of Changbin’s soul and shaping them anew with his fingers. It must be his magic. Something in it moves inside of Changbin, wraps around his core like a rope and secures it tight and possessive, claiming the life before it can escape Minho’s grasp.

Minho touches his cheek with the same tenderness he spares to the frail things he can’t salvage, only witness their withering, helplessly offering his own life as forfeit.

“How terrible it is,” Minho whispers into the curve of Changbin’s cupid bow, licking on the salt of their heated kisses, “to love something that death can touch.”

Changbin feels an echo, a tide, a pull from the depths of his stomach that floods his entire being with light. He sees the new moon reflected on the blown out irises of Minho’s eyes, dark and transient like all ends and beginnings.

“How wonderful it is,” Changbin says to the phantom pain on Minho’s shoulder, the commas with the exact shape of his own teeth, “to love.”

x

The plum tree in the backyard stays dead when Minho’s slumber is too weak of a presence to keep it alive. Minho brings it back first thing every morning, way before sunrise reaches the dried out bark and severs what’s left of its being in this realm.

Perhaps it’s why the cats are always there with Minho, Soonie sleepy on his lap, Doongie and Dori chasing each other under the tree. They feed from the ripe plums bursting on the ground, their whiskers heavy with juice.

Changbin places a steaming cup of plum tea on Minho’s hands but he doesn’t drink it. His eyes are lost in the dawning sky.

“I was thinking about you.”

“About me?”

“About what you said,” Minho plays with the ring on his index finger. “How wonderful it is. To just love.”

“To love,” Changbin echoes.

Doongie and Dori take turns pouncing on a plum. The air is rich with the unnatural smell of spring in midwinter.

“Do you think they were ever happy?” Minho asks, and in his eyes Changbin sees cups overflowing. Eight cups of devotion, eight cups of self-deception, like the tarot card.

Soonie purrs in response, crawls up Minho’s chest and licks the tears from his chin. Changbin takes his hand, kisses the ring Minho never takes off.

“I’m sure, hyung.”

Something happens then. Changbin can only describe it as a spasm, a soft undulation in the air, like an old, unused wheel finding traction.

Plums retreat into their seeds, leaves fade into their buds, branches are drained taut and wrinkled. The plum tree unbirths itself at daybreak and it’s beautiful, so beautiful.

The tea has disappeared from Minho’s cup. He gets on his feet.

“Let’s go,” Minho says, Soonie climbing on his shoulders, the other two following his trail. “I have to send them with honors.”

x

Some magics come with a higher price than others. Changbin’s gives him headaches that don’t go away with medicine, insomniac nights where he becomes the shadow haunting his own house, unable to turn off the connection the universe has with his brain.

He makes peace with the fact life comes with unasked gifts. To be a witch is to tame them into something more palatable. Swim with the tide the moon brings.

Minho assembles the cats inside a circle of shriveled plum flowers. He kisses each one on the top of their head, between their ears, whispering praises and shared memories of happier times. Soonie, the mellow one. Doongie, the curious one. And Dori. Baby Dori. The fearless one.

Minho cups his hands like a prayer, and the deep breath he takes sounds like the earth opening up. Black butterflies fly out of his mouth to embrace the remnants of three beloved tabby cats and carry them to the afterlife in a burst of plum petals.

To be a necromancer, Changbin understands, is to be gifted with unending love. Sometimes it wounds deeper than death itself.

x

Minho moves in with him and the first thing he does is break the latch of the bedroom window.

“I don’t like feeling locked,” is the only explanation he provides, impetuous like a child.

Changbin often sits on the windowsill to watch Minho work on the garden when dawn is still more purple than pink. It’s how he’s found to keep busy in the nights he can’t sleep after his shift, working his bare hands into the soil, planting flowers. Hyunjin and his cat come visit every now and then to praise his camellias. 

One morning Changbin catches Minho cupping his hands and blowing on a fresh mound of earth. It sounds like the shell of an egg making way for a birdie’s beak, the first notes of its birth song as it breathes. A divine breath of life.

“What did you plant?”

“It’s a secret,” Minho winks, smears cold and damp soil onto Changbin’s forehead. “You’ll find out when it blooms.”

Changbin wipes ten years of waiting off his forehead. On his fingers, the sweet smell of apples growing roots. On his mind, Minho’s smile as he picks the first harvest on a bright spring morning, the sun kissing his face and reflecting on the ring that never left his finger in all of those years.

And there, nearly escaping the periphery of his vision, Changbin sees them.

Cats.

Three new cats.

Minho tells them stories of those he loved before them, and those he still loves. Changbin is there too, barefooted and surrounded by camellias. Still Minho’s favorite flower.

To be a necromancer, Changbin understands, is to bring life from fragile seeds and lay them to sleep when the time arrives. Is to hope for rebirth when the trees will sing.

To love a necromancer, Changbin also understands, is to grow with him.

**Author's Note:**

> listen to moving mountain's ode we will bury ourselves (the new version) after you finish reading this. it's exactly how i imagine the ending mood to be.


End file.
